


Don't you want it?

by ShadowSelene (Shadowdianne)



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-20 16:24:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19995190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowdianne/pseuds/ShadowSelene
Summary: "Pain can turn you into the worst form of yourself."Asked by emettkaysworld via tumblr





	Don't you want it?

**Author's Note:**

> I had so many ideas for this one Xd, I needed a few attempts to decide which one could work better since my original idea was to focus either on Emma during the Dark One arc or making it revolve around Regina’s thinking during different points of her own redemption arc. Perhaps throw a flashback scene while at it. Eventually, I decided to go for this.
> 
> Set in: 4X19. With some disregarding the time-line in terms of plot.

New York rose around the three of them as they exited the car, the buildings and noise from the city circling their throats as they eyed the apartment building that stood in front of them. It wasn’t as bad as the one Regina and Emma had been in while searching for Lily and the unspoken but still deliberate comparison pended over their heads. It could be the still fresh magic surge Emma had felt back at the road, but the blonde felt herself sway for a second as Regina circled the car, a careful hand touching the back of her elbow the moment she lost her footing, boots scratching the asphalt with a sound unnaturally loud for the younger woman’s ears.

Eyeing the brunette woman Emma smiled at her as an almost automatic response, muscles tense around her mouth and eyes as she tried to regain her balance. She didn’t need long before she felt ready to walk into the building, the scent of cooking food wafting towards them as Lily waited, back against the metallic door of the car. Eyes swift and brow furrowed, she kept a close eye on both Regina and Emma with the kind of curiosity that made the blonde feel uneasy; watched, judged. Beginning to take a step away from Regina as the brunette’s brown eyes traveled from the façade of the building towards her face, Emma saw the telling signs of a storm brewing on the older woman’s pupils. Which, she knew, would have been colored in purples and lilacs would have they been back inside the barrier that protected Storybrooke from the rest of the world.

Despite the impossibility of something magical, Emma could almost feel the scent of ozone on the back of her throat, forming a quickly thickening coat that made her swallow, nervous. Halting, the hold on her elbow tightened just enough for her eyes to widen as she glanced back to where Regina was still looking at her, expression open, somber.

“Don’t you want to enter?” The question came out of her in a much weaker way than she had intended and the half-hearted circle her free hand started as her words were swallowed by the surrounding noise, died before she could even finish it. Fingers growing warm as her skin grew too thin beneath Regina’s hold, Emma felt the residual anger she had tried to keep on stocking for the duration of their journey –the one that had made her feel feverish as she had stared at Lily through the barrel of her gun, diminish and wither in a way that made her gasp.

Regina kept staring at her, as she pushed her to the side, close enough for them to keep an eye on Lily but far enough for Emma to stumble as the former queen let her go from her grasp, standing close, however, for Emma to glance down, unsure.

“You told me that in this world there were neither heroes nor villains.” The brunette’s words were said without preamble, her voice soft but still holding a very particular bite to it; the same kind of one Emma had felt on her bones a few hours ago when she had felt ready to repeat something she felt she had already done with Cruella; the woman’s face embedded into the insides of her eyelids. Regina had brought her back from that with a chilling understanding that made her shiver as she glanced at Lily, unable to stop herself. The other woman glared back; anger seeping through, distrust on her pupils.

She had, indeed, said it so. And there was a thing she believed in; a thing that had turned out to be the backbone of her very reasoning way before Henry had knocked on her door. There were bad people, good people; real people.

Yet, ever since she had entered into Storybrooke greys were beginning to become more and more difficult to look at them, always distorted by history and pain from a world she felt as far away as magic had felt once. The very thought of it made her recoil; the admission of her self; her own self, the only thing that had been everything she had been able to feel sure about for the longest of times a byproduct of someone else’s decision acting as hot iron on her inwards; metal bands clutching her heart as she tried to breathe.

She wondered as she looked back at Regina; if the older woman could sense her turmoil with the same precision she had been able to tell her she intended to go with her in this crazy plan of returning the woman who had been the recipient of someone else plan in the same way the two of them had been. She knew, even before the words were fully formed in her mind, that the brunette could, indeed.

Feeling mangled to the point of no return, formless in the way Regina kept eyeing her as if waiting for some kind of response; far too hot, far too intense, far too full of a promise Emma could only bite her bottom lip at, the blonde swallowed thickly before nodding once, twice.

“I did.”

Regina sighed, tension leaving her body as she rose the hand that had been circling the blonde’s arm, fingers curved still, soft as they paused an inch away from Emma’s jaw, warmth radiating in waves that felt entirely too powerful for them to not be magical. As impossible as that was.

“I need you to focus on that, Emma.” Regina closed the already minuscule distance that kept them apart even more with one single step towards her direction, her chest brushing Emma’s, her fingers hovering less than an inch away from her face as the blonde realized she was trembling, nervous and about to bolt and yet still not truly wanting to. “We will talk when we are back to Storybrooke. I promise you that. But I need you to believe what you told me.”

“I do believe…” For a second, Emma thought of Henry, her voice holding the same whining quality the teen’s voice took whenever either of them reminded him that he needed to eat healthily. Ashamed, she glanced down, the movement creating the contact she hadn’t been sure she was ready for; the graze of Regina’s fingers powerful in the same sense a magical discharge would be, phantom-like sparks igniting her blood-stream.

“You don’t.” Regina’s eyes were wise, her cheeks flushed and Emma needed to bite down on her tongue as she battled against the need to tilt her head, to kiss her, to throw everything else she had been trying to build out of expectations to someone who had seen her more like a bargaining chip, a concept, rather than what she had been, out of the window. “You did once but you don’t anymore.”

It was cryptic enough for the blonde to want to scream again, to tell Regina to keep silent about things she truly didn’t understand. What was there to say after all? Emma felt robbed of the very ability to answer back with anger; rage an emotion good people weren’t supposed to feel anymore. Not when one’s moral compass was, apparently, in jeopardy.

Before she was able to fully comprehend her own string of thoughts, words blurted out of her; scalding ones that felt more like gashes into the air between the two of them as she took that step back, moving away from Regina’s far too beckoning warmth. One she missed the second she felt her senses grow less clear, less vivid, as New York’s smoke embraced her.

“You say this, but you think like them too.” Neither of the two needed to ask who she was referring to and even if Lily’s head snapped towards them as if she had been able to listen to her words, Emma merely licked her lips before she lowered her chin, hair tickling at her cheeks. “You are in this mighty horse, Regina, about pain and redemption but you also think that everything that moves away from this very narrow path will automatically turn me…”

“Into a villain?” Regina’s mouth quirked into a smile so reminiscent from the one Emma could still remember seeing on the counterpart she so briefly had been able to meet that the blonde’s wrath turned to ice. Chuckling gravely, Regina shook her head while she lowered her hand, placing it over her own stomach, not pressing but flat. “Haven’t you read Henry’s comics dear? It’s always much more complicated than that.”

Emma closed her hands into fists, muscles straining beneath her clothes. She had denied herself a negative response to the very little information she had gotten; she had turned deaf to the gut sensation that had kept her alive for the most part of her adult life. A thing she had promised herself to never do again. She felt spent, pained, and so she centered her every core around it, wishing for another thunderbolt to cross the sky that felt darker than it should truly be; almost yellow around the corner, dirty and washed out on its light.

“Then why did you even say…” She was stopped by Regina’s closing the little distance she had created for them with too much easiness. The kind of one that made her almost want to ask her in bitterness why she was even doing this in front of her supposed soulmate’s apartment. Hasn’t she been so worried about him? About a man who had crossed the line and readied himself to never see her again? The questions; callous, died on her tongue as Regina sighed and rose her fingers once more, trapping one lock of her hair and placing it back behind her ear with a quickness to it; a raw honesty to it, that Emma could only gape.

“Because that’s what the voice inside your head is telling you; that your parents are right.”

Regina’s eyes were full once more and Emma glanced at Lily as she tried to regain some sense to the way the sentence floated towards her, chaining itself to her very skin. The other brunette, however, merely rose one eyebrow towards her; something else equally deep on them; a kind of something that felt almost animalistic in the way it made Emma shudder as she focused on the former queen once more.

Woman who was far from finishing.

“You do want to have these responses to them, to the pain. But you don’t want to give into the satisfaction of a self-written warning.”

Emma pointed at the building a few meters away from them, agitated enough to push back even if she didn’t know exactly how. This time, it was her who got into Regina’s space; breathing hard; ragged.

“Aren’t you doing the same then?”

Regina’s eyes flashed, and, for a moment, Emma almost expected a magic attack from her, one like the one she had gotten so long ago at the brunette’s porch. It, of course, never came, but she still felt the muscles on her abdomen tighten as ire turned into a blade. One she felt bothered enough to use. Even if that meant burning every bridge.

“You say this but here you are; talking about anger and rage as if that alone would make you evil.” Seething, Emma shook her head; trying to clear her thoughts enough to form a wall between the brunette and herself even if everything was telling her just keep pushing, to keep moving, until neither she or Regina had a place, had space, to go. Gritting her teeth, Emma grasped Regina’s hand by her wrist; fingertips pressed against the brunette’s pulse point. “And you are so much better than that.”

_Than him._

For a moment, a far too long moment, neither of them moved and as Emma’s ears began to pick New York’s aura back once again, she felt the prickling sensation of a decision begging to be made settling around her stomach, getting lower with every breathing she took.

Until Regina made the decision for her and stepped back; lips fuller-looking than before. Casting a side-way glance to Lily, the brunette shrugged; self-deprecatingly.

“You stopped yourself.”

“You made me.”

The words flew, and Emma hugged her torso; unsure of what was she trying to defend anymore. Or if she was really supposed to. Regina sighed deeply at that before she hummed; lost in thought.

“You deserve better, Emma. Deep down, you know it.”

And, with that, she walked towards the building’s door, posture as perfect as ever; steps as full of momentum as Emma had always known her.

“You could have done worse, Swan.” Lily’s words registered slowly but when they did Emma couldn’t do a thing as the woman smirked, the resemblance to Mal a flashing thought.

“We aren’t what you think.”

“Don’t you want it?”


End file.
